134 min | PG-13 | March 31, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
A washed-up bard and his barbarian partner break out of prison to rob the man who betrayed them and stole one of their daughters. They assemble the worst adventuring party in the realm. The dice land better than they have any right to.
Edgin is a thief and a lousy lute player who lost his wife and now plans one big heist to steal back his daughter and a tablet that resurrects the dead. His partner Holga is a barbarian who hits things and feels guilty about her divorce. The film they inhabit is a fantasy adventure that knows exactly what a tabletop campaign feels like. It is about a party of incompetents improvising their way through a plan that never survives contact with the dungeon. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein build the whole movie on the gap between the heroic quest these people imagine and the shambling mess they actually pull off.
Chris Pine plays Edgin as a con man whose only real skill is talking, and Pine commits to the joke that talking is not a skill in a world of wizards and dragons. Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga with a deadpan physicality that makes the comedy land harder because she never reaches for it. Justice Smith plays Simon as a sorcerer paralyzed by his own self-doubt, and the running gag of a magician who cannot perform under pressure pays off when it finally matters. Hugh Grant plays Forge as a smiling traitor who has talked his way into a lordship, and Grant weaponizes his charm into something genuinely slippery. Regé-Jean Page plays the paladin Xenk with such earnest nobility that he becomes the funniest performance in the film by playing it completely straight.
Daley and Goldstein direct from a script they wrote with Michael Gilio, and they shoot the action so the audience can read it. A single-take sequence through a series of magical portals tracks every body in motion and refuses to hide the choreography behind cutting. The film leans on practical creatures and physical sets, and the owlbear and the gelatinous cube register as things with weight rather than digital smears. A shapeshifting chase staged around Sophia Lillis as the druid Doric turns transformation into a continuous visual gag instead of a power demonstration. The score nods at the genre without taking it seriously, which is the correct instinct for a movie this loose.
This is a film that respects the source material by refusing to treat it as sacred. It cares about the rules of its world precisely so it can let the characters fail to follow them. The emotional core sits in Edgin’s relationship with his daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, and the film earns that thread without letting it strangle the jokes. The result is a fantasy adventure that wants nothing more than to be fun and has the craft to deliver on it. It is a good time built by people who clearly understand why the game is worth playing.